Perhaps it is too strong a word to say that this week's readings come as a form kismet to my life. My academic pursuits smashed directly into my career this week. As I was reading all about feedback and assessment, I was in the process of providing feedback to my students on their third drafts of their career essays. On Monday I collected roughly 80 drafts (out of 96 students, that is pretty good for this year), and I have until Monday to read them all. 80 drafts over 7 days, gives me about 12 drafts a day to read. This is down significantly from last year when I had roughly 20 drafts to read a day. 12 drafts a day does not seem like a Herculean task, but while teaching from 8-3, then grad school from either 4:30-9:20 or 4:30-5:45, it can be difficult to cram those 12 drafts in. This is why I devoured Haswell's article. I am always looking for a way to provide meaningful feedback, in an efficient and quick manner.
For the bad drafts, the system we have at school works pretty well. It is supposed to take 5 minutes to grade each essay, using a numbering system and correlates with a piece of paper each student has. When I see a mistake, I put a number next to that mistake and the student can see what that mistake is. However, there is no room for praising solid ideas in this system. There are no numbers that correspond with things done well. Because of this, I always take longer than 5 minutes because I include an ending comment for ideas that are too difficult to articulate with a number. In all honesty, the number system we have works incredibly well for level 1 errors, but idea level errors are difficult to apply a numerical system to.
Haswell's article makes mention of this idea that there is a disconnect between what instructors mean on a comment and what students interpret those comments to mean. I have been thinking about this all week because, while Turnitin.com has a short hand system that helps explain what those comments mean, I hate reading drafts/papers on a screen, so I prefer handwritten comments. I have taken recently to making most of my comments questions that I want the students to answer in their essay. For example, for this current career essay, students could chose 1 of 3 prompts: they could research their dream career and write an informative essay about it, they could research multiple careers and write a comparative essay, or they could forgo the career aspect and write an essay about the types of traveling they would like to do, backed by research about the places they want to visit. If the student wrote "There are some downsides to this job" but did not explain them, I used to write "Elaborate" and move on, but now I write "Can you tell me some of the specific downsides to the job?" Then in my end comment I remind them to answer all of the questions through their essay, while pointing out what I liked, what worked, etc.
I think this method gels with Haswell because I think it gets rid of that disconnect. It takes me a few minutes longer per draft, but I am hopeful the final products will be stronger.
I think you must be an amazing teacher from everything I have read in your blog. Just to deal with this volume of work is amazing. I like your asking questions. That forces students to respond in their revisions. You don't have the leisure for conferences or audiotaped responses. I find commenting on students' papers one of the hardest parts of teaching writing. How to be positive and not judgmental while adding some value to the student's understanding of what needs to be reworked in a piece of writing to make it better.
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